Bladecenter is a widely used architecture in datacenters. Bladecenter allows housing multiple blade servers in a single chassis. It is used to save space and improve system management.
Blade servers are thin servers that insert into a single rack-mounted chassis which supplies shared power, cooling, and networking infrastructure.
Each server is an independent server having its own processors, memory, storage, network controllers, operating system, and applications.
Blade servers allow more processing power in less rack space, simplifying cabling and reducing power consumption.
The advantage of blade servers comes not only from the consolidation benefits of housing several servers in a single chassis, but also from the consolidation of associated resources (like storage and networking equipment) into a smaller architecture that can be managed through a single interface.
Each blade server typically comes with several local drives. For additional storage, blade servers can connect to a storage pool facilitated by a network-attached storage, Fiber Channel, or iSCSI storage-area network.
A blade center has generally at least one USB port which is assigned to a specific blade server when the data of the USB device is to be accessed. The USB assignment is generally done by an administrator from an external computing console, which is connected to the blade servers via a management module which contains logic to allow USB data to be accessed by the assigned blade server.
A typical blade center is illustrated in FIG. 1. A blade server chassis 102 coupled to a management module 104 includes a plurality of blade servers 102-0 to 102-n. The management module 104 offers at least one USB port 106 to allow connection of a USB device 108, and a serial port 110 to connect an administration computing console 112. The serial port may be a common COM port compliant with the well-known RS-232 standard. The USB devices 108 may be any type of USB compliant device that uses flash memory storage. The logic to allow the operation of blade servers, specifically the allocation of data from the USB device, is made of a micro-controller 114 which transmits the selection from the administrative console 112 to a multiplexer 116 that receives the USB data and transmits it to the assigned blade server.
This conventional USB assignment operation is heavy, tedious and may involve errors as any new settings need to run an initial program load (IPL) of the overall system.
Moreover, the existing system allows only one blade server to use data stored on the USB key at a time, which is a great limitation in contemporary systems because information delivered on USB keys is only shared sequentially between several blade servers. Without any limitation, an example is the famous license terms and conditions that must be approved before using software applications and which is a typical use of sharing the same data amongst a plurality of blade servers.
Finally, another drawback of such conventional arrangements is that the access to the USB key is time consuming.